The "Bloodthirsty Bitches and Pious Pimps of Power"

For some time here, and elsewhere on the Internet, I’ve been discussing the rapid mental metastasis of the society. It seems I have something of a comrade in arms now, none other than the redoubtable Gerry Spence. Arguably the best trial lawyer in our history, Spence’s latest book is a sociological polemic so powerful, and so interesting that I read it in just two sittings. Never have I ever met anyone with whom I agree so totally. Reading “Bloodthirsty Bitches and Pious Pimps of Power” was like listening to my own thought processes.

In fact, there’s a problem with that. Plagiarism. Spence and I are evidently so alike in our thought and opinions that someone will inevitably accuse me of plagiarism. Gerry is famous, I’m not. But I wrote “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story” two years ago, I’ve been writing my “Mongoose Tactic” blog for several years now, and it’s all a matter of record. I also happen to think that Gerry Spence is a man of honor, like myself. That’ll do.

“Bloodthirsty,” written in the terse, yet chatty manner characteristic of his courtroom style, is prefaced with a first chapter entitled “Hate Sells.” The cover of his book is emblazoned with caricatures of the high priests of today’s Orwellian Newspeak, Nancy Grace (Grace? Jesus! – the way chaotic co-incidence sometimes works!), Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and Pat Robertson, and I suppose the fact that Spence hasn’t included Sean Hannity in the cohort of Attila the Hun wannabes on the cover is more due space constraints than the more obvious considerations. The people who sell hate, after all, are almost as numerous electronically as those who prostitute – that’s sell, too, you know – sex with pornography.

But there you have it. I don’t really believe these people are real. Nobody is that stupid. These are thespians, actors hired to play a part. They’re selling, all right, and the great lawyer’s thesis is that because it’s massively profitable, the “new conservatives” do everything they can to stir up hatred – it sells television time, books they write, and furthers their commercial interests. The stations who “pimp” – Spence’s term – them to the public are likewise far more interested in their bottom line than in the nation’s health.

Surprise! As Johanna, heroine of my novel, says, “Never trust a capitalist – everything’s for sale.”

Incidentally, have you ever wondered how somebody who spews vicious and hyperbolic nonsense like these people came to be called “conservative?” I can remember when conservative meant restrained, careful, cautious; moderate (perish the ugly thought!), even.

Gerry Spence has it, right on the proverbial button. But there’s more, I think – much more. The lawyer doesn’t seem to be aware of - doesn’t mention it anywhere, anyway - CIA Operation Mockingbird. The brainchild of a man named Frank Wisner, director of what was then in the Central Intelligence Agency called the Office of Plans, Mockingbird was the plan to take control of the nation’s news media. I spoke recently of Mockingbird and federal programs designed and intended to “dumb-down” the nation, readers to my website will recall, and while my website delineates the operation more completely elsewhere, it will suffice here to synopsize. In fact, we may as well go back to the guy who originated it all.

Control of the news media by a government has just one purpose, propaganda. Josef Goebbels was Reichsminister der Propaganda for Adolf Hitler and the man who brought the Fuehrer to power, and Gerry Spence devotes Chapter Eight in his book to “The Ghost of Goebbels, Propaganda and the Rock-Hard Right.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

The Reichsminister might, though. “Propaganda is a means to an end,” he pontificated. “Its purpose is to lead the people to an understanding that will allow it to willingly and without internal resistance devote itself to the task and goals of a superior leadership.

“In the end, such propaganda miraculously makes the unpopular popular, enabling even a government’s most difficult decisions to secure the resolute support of the people. A government that uses it properly can do what is necessary without running the risk of losing the masses . . .’

“The effective propagandist must be a master of the art of speech, of writing, of journalism, of the poster, and of the leaflet. He must have the gift to use the major methods of influencing public opinion such as the press, film and radio to serve his ideas and goals.”

Goebbels, the master of deceit nonpareil, went on: “The rank and file are usually much more primitive that we imagine. Propaganda must therefore be simple and repetitious . . . it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”

If you don’t, in that, recognize today’s television – watched by people in the Land of the Free for hours every day – you’re brain-dead. Just what you’re intended to be. How many times have you heard “FoxNews – fair and balanced, as usual”?

“Think of the press as a great keyboard,” Reichsminister Goebbels said, “on which the government can play.” It was only a co-incidence, I suppose, that Frank Wisner saw Operation Mockingbird (“cute” – meaning ironic or cynical - names for operations were much in vogue, then) as a means by which to “orchestrate” - one of his favorite, if not characteristic, words – public opinion. Another of Wisner’s brainchilds, Radio Free Europe, he called his “Mighty Wurlitzer . . . you don’t even have to play – you just put in a nickel.”

Let’s back up a little – “return to those thrilling days of yesteryear,” as the overture to the old Lone Ranger radio program once ran. In 1933, the same year (by ugly co-incidence) the Lone Ranger radio program was inaugurated, Germany was a dismal place, in an economic depression even worse – it that’s possible – than that of the United States then. In Germany, the “greater champion of justice” (also lines from our radio program’s overture) was a guy called “der Fuehrer,” and it’s how he came to power that’s interesting for our purposes here.

Pay attention, now. The president of Germany then was an old – very old – general named Hindenburg. Under enormous pressure to do something – anything - about Germany’s plight, the president appointed Adolf Hitler German Chancellor. Now, Hitler’s political position was pretty tenuous, at best. The Nazi Party had only 44% of the total vote despite the suppression of the opposition press (italics mine) and the monopoly the NSDAP enjoyed on the state radio during the previous election campaign. Its two hundred, eighty-eight seats combined with fifty-two Nationalist seats gives Hitler's government a bare sixteen seat majority.

In other words, Hitler had won election by the proverbial skin of his teeth. Remind you of anything? Keep reading.

Hitler had been sworn into power in January, 1933. A month later – still paying attention? – the Reichstag – it amounts to our capitol building – burned to the ground. A disaster – right? Guess what. The Communist Party, the Nazis chief rival for election to power, was implicated. William L Shirer, author of “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” the definitive history of Germany at the time, tells it like this:

“The coincidence that the Nazis found a demented Communist arsonist who was out to do exactly what they themselves had determined to do seems incredible, but it is nevertheless supported by the evidence. The idea for the fire almost certainly originated at the top with Goebbels and Goering . . . it was Goebbels who first thought of setting the Reichstag on fire.”

There’s more, too. “Goering knew,” Shirer goes on, and quoting an official at the time, “exactly how the fire was to be started and ordered the official, ‘to prepare, prior to the fire, a list of people who were to be arrested immediately after it.’”

How about that – a disaster just in the nick of time! I don’t suppose that reminds you of anything.

Well, how about this: Hitler and Company still had much to do. The Treaty of Versailles that followed World War One forbade Germany a military of any kind, and you can’t rule the world without an army. Then, too, another of Hitler’s goals was to eradicate the people he hated more than anything on earth – that’s the Jews - and the Jews were scattered all over Europe. No army, and enemies of the German people – notice that I didn’t call them “terrorists”; mustn’t be suggestive, here - scattered everywhere.

What to do? Well, among the first things the Nazis did for the German people was assure by providing a cheap, yet efficient radio that each home had one. In a trice, the nation of Germany went from suspicion of the Jewish people among them, to screaming hatred toward them.

Then, lo and behold, there was discovered a plot to attack Germany; no, not the Jews – Poland. Hitler ordered Germany onto wartime footing – a German company named Krupp was the Halliburton (was that suggestive?) of the time, and attacked Poland. Everyone in German wondered why the hell they were attacking the Poles, when all along it had been Jews the Nazis blamed for all the trouble in Germany, but the Fuehrer was their guy, and he said the Poles were preparing to attack.

“Weapons of mass destruction” in German is Waffen der Massenzerstörung. Just thought you’d like to know.

Now, mind you – and just because I have that picture of the World Trade Center with the “Dog didn’t bark” quote from the Sherlock Holmes Adventure of the Silver Blaze beside it on my website – I make no suggestion that the administration’s – Bush, I mean – explanation of who was to blame for 9/11 was similarly invented. That’s exactly how Gerry Spence put it, too. Like I said, we think almost exactly alike. There are co-incidences all over the place, these days – aren’t there?

Like the great lawyer, I also observe “only” that the U.S. public accepted the government’s explanation for the World Trade Center attack in much that same manner the German people in 1933 accepted their government’s explanation for the Reichstag fire. I might even say the same thing about the way the public here accepted the Bush Administration’s explanation for invading Iraq and the way Germany’s people accepted their government’s invasion of Poland.

But I wouldn’t, because to say that would be much too heavy-handed. Assuming you’re smart enough to make a sandwich, you were probably ahead of me, anyway. If you weren’t, you may want to consider getting help.

At any rate, of course, World War ensued, killing a whole hell of a lot of people – and I’ll let you figure our which war it is I’m talking about. It might not make any difference to you, actually - “America” these days being what it is.

Let’s change the subject. Today’s news is about another one of the “N-Word” things. Somebody has done it again: a couple of vocal fricatives, one or two glottal stops, and the nation is seething from coast to coast, border to border, with hate. A talk-show guy named Imus said the Rutgers Women’s Basketball Team was a bunch of what you can hear just about every time a kid playing rap “music”(?) on his car disk player pulls up beside you at the stop light. That the horrible word was invented - “Ebonics,” I think it was called then - by the minority group now so offended and incensed by its use, and is used by them with absolutely relentless continuality and in every form of entertainment in which they indulge, seems to have escaped everyone.

Nevertheless, as Gerry Spence says, hate sells. And here is a chance to sell hate, umbriago! Don Imus should be executed, his family banished from our fair nation, his property burned, and the land it once occupied plowed up and seeded with salt, in order that nothing ever grow there again. The Imus name should be expunged from public record. Can you think of anything else? Never fear, the Rose O’Donnell-Ann Coulter hatemongering types will. Count on it.

A single, one-syllable word!

And, you probably haven’t noticed – but I’ll do it for you – twelve of our soldiers and literally scores of Iraq’s citizens were killed in Iraq the day Imus or whatever his name is said that awful word. Here you are, your country engaged in what historians will almost certainly call the most ill-conceived and miserably prosecuted war in history, running on account of that war and the FUBAR government you have on an economic treadmill you no longer have an ice cube’s in hell’s chance of leaving or surviving, with illegal immigrant criminals pouring into the country under government auspices, and all the rest, and you’re agonizing over a word? Jesucristo!

Hate not only sells, Mr. Spence, hate is a wonderful behavioral tool by which to stupefy a public, to render them, in the words of the poet, ‘stunned and stolid, a brother to the ox.” The guy who sired Anna Nicole Smith’s baby is about to be determined, and the administration needs another distraction. Operation Mockingbird, and the power of the propaganda will supply it, you can bet on that. When Don Imus has joined Keith – or whatever the hell his name was – Richards on the sacrificial racist, sexist, bigot, whatever-the-hell-have-you altar orchestrated by the Mighty Wurlitzer, we will go back to the Mutt and Jeff, Bad Cop-Good Cop routine between the Congress and the White House. Watching dutifully as each of the malicious miscreants spouts his phony but fulminating fury, our heads will swing back and forth like spectators at a tennis match.

Even when disaster is upon us – remind yourself of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans – we will sit swinging mindlessly back and forth like pendulums. Bet on it. The Bloodthirsty Bitches and Pious Pimps of Power will see to it.